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By Silicon Valley Robotics via Robohub: The area of service robotics is getting active, with a new retail robot startup launching today. Tally is one of several robotics startups launching today at Haxlr8r’s 7th Demo Day. Tally is an inventory tracking robot platform fromSimbe Robotics and the “world’s first robotic autonomous shelf auditing and analytics solution” according to the press release.
Tally is in trials with several North American retailers and will traverse aisles scanning and auditing merchandise to help stores maintain ideal product placement, fill inventory gaps, and find misplaced or mispriced items. Tally is also capable of autonomously returning to base to charge.
“When it comes to the retail industry, shopper experience is everything. If a product is unavailable at the time the shopper wants to buy it, the retailer has missed an opportunity and disappointed their customer,” according to Brad Bogolea, CEO and Co-founder of Simbe Robotics. “Tally helps retailers address these challenges by providing more precise and timely analysis of the state of in-store merchandise and freeing up staff to focus on customer service.” Cont'd...

SkyTech 2016 is a two-day B2B tradeshow for the commercial UAV industry. In 2016 SkyTech will incorporate an exhibition, three conferences, workshops, product launches, live demonstrations and marketing opportunities for the commercial UAV community.

By being able to design diffusers in 3D and print them, we streamline the prototyping process tremendously. We can do virtual simulations with the 3D models to get a sense of the effectiveness, and we can make aesthetic or functional changes before it's printed.

From Institute of Science and Technology Austria:
Robotic systems controlled by a neural network spontaneously develop self-organized behaviors. Researchers propose a novel learning rule in PNAS to explain the development of sensorimotor intelligence.
It is fascinating to observe a robot exploring its physical possibilities and surroundings, and subsequently developing different self-taught behaviors without any instructions. In their paper (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1508400112) published on October, 26, 2015 in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), Professor Ralf Der from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, und Georg Martius, Postdoc and Fellow at the Institute for Science and Technology (IST Austria), demonstrate the emergence of sensorimotor intelligence in robots based on their proposed learning rule...
... To test their hypothesis, the authors use bioinspired robots consisting of a humanoid and a hexapod robot in physically realistic computer simulations. The robots receive sensory input from their bodies but are not given any form of instruction or task. What can then be observed is a rich spectrum of rhythmic behaviors of the robots as they explore various movements. Solely because of the tight coupling of environment, body, and brain (in this case an artificial neural network), the robots can obtain feedback from their situation and adapt quickly. This, together with a simple, learned self-model, allows them to develop a form of sensorimotor intelligence... ( full article ) ( paper ) ( videos and other materials )

The Yosemite incident, and others in America and Australia, are representative of wider discussions that need to be brought to the public's doorstep if respect for when and where to use drone technology can be instilled as an agreed-upon standard of general practice.

From University of California, Irvine:
VATIC is a free, online, interactive video annotation tool for computer vision research that crowdsources work to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Our tool makes it easy to build massive, affordable video data sets and can be deployed on a cloud. After three years of research, vatic is now used by labs around the world to annotate the next generation of data sets.
Features
Crowdsource video annotation to Mechanical Turk
Automatic quality assurance for good annotations
Complex payment schedules and bonuses
One-click worker compensation
Optimized interface for video annotation
Offline mode for expert annotator use (no MTurk)
( site ) ( github )

Whether there is a necessity to pull someone from a collapsed building, find a survivor trapped in a pile of debris, locate a lost child, or save victims by putting out a fire, robots will be an intrinsic member of the first responders in the future.

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